Spotify is a new piece of software (well relatively new anyway) which you can download to your PC or Mac and then listen to as much music as you want – for free. It’s advertising supported, so unless you sign up for the premium account, you’ll be hearing an ad every four or five tracks (and this’ll probably grow in the future). However, it’s brilliant being able to listen to practically any track or album you want (and legally as well).

Now if only it combined with last.fm’s recommendation engine, that would be amazing, but in the meantime, it can scrobble your tracks to your last.fm account. I would have probably prefered it if it had been a last.fm service to begin with though, to avoid having to give my e-mail address to another company.

Saying that though, Spotify’s a great way to preview music before you buy it, and could mean you potentially save a fortune on music too. With this, there’s potentially no reason you’d ever have to buy music again, as long as you don’t mind putting up with the ads. You can give it a go here – invites were required previously but if you’re in the UK you no longer need one to sign up. An iPhone version would obviously be awesome!

I bought Apple’s new iLife software package on Tuesday from the Apple Store in Belfast (they seemed to have plenty in stock as well) and spent the night playing with the new iPhoto. iPhoto and iDVD are the only parts of iLife I use (I use Final Cut Express for video editing, and don’t use Garage Band at all), and iDVD hasn’t been updated for this release of iLife, but I think the iPhoto update is worth the £70 or so alone.

This is a long post, so click on for my thoughts….

There are two new features in iPhoto that are brilliant. The first is facial recognition. When you start up the new iPhoto, the software scans all the photos in your library, trying to find faces. After that, it’s a case of going into one of your photos, and putting a name against a face. Do that a couple of times, and iPhoto will start to suggest photos which have that person in them.

I haven’t played around with it fully, but named a lot of people, and it seemed to do a pretty good job of recognising them. Although it did mistake me for my Dad a couple of times  

I used to hate putting new photos into iPhoto, and then having to tag them with name tags for people in the photo, and then tag them again when uploading them to Facebook. Hopefully though, this will be a thing of the past – iPhoto ‘09 includes a Facebook plug-in. So from now on the process for tagging etc. in iPhoto and Facebook should be pretty seamless:

• put photos into iPhoto
• check facial recognition in iPhoto, correct any errors
• ensure that in the Faces pane of iPhoto I’ve entered in people’s full names and e-mail addresses (in the pane that appears when you click on i on a person’s face)
• go back and select the photos I want to upload
• upload to Facebook by clicking on the Facebook icon

Hopefully then, tagging with names will be a thing of the past. If it works photos will be automatically tagged with people’s Facebook names, and uploaded seamlessly. 

Going through and correcting facial recognition errors seems to be pretty quick – you can use TAB to flick between faces in a photo, and Enter to enter the person’s name. I haven’t worked out what is the best way to go in and confirm matches though.

There’s also a Places feature in iPhoto ‘09 which allows you to tag where pictures were taken or have iPhoto access GPS data on your photos if your camera supports that (and not many seem to at the moment). My iPhone tags photos using its in-built GPS, so when I clicked on the Maps pane in iPhoto I could see where all my iPhone photos had been taken. It was pretty fun, and I’ll probably try to map most photos I take now.

Roll in some neat new slideshow templates, and enhanced editing (such as being able to improve saturation without affecting skin tone) and iPhoto ‘09 seems to be worth the money, even if you won’t be using that many other parts of iLife. For advanced editing (yet not too advanced), Photoshop Elements is probably still a good buy, but for organisation of the average person’s photo library, iPhoto seems hard to beat – with it’s options to sort and sift by event, people or places.

Amazon.co.uk at the time of writing has iLife for a slight discount, at £63.24 for the single edition or there’s the five user family pack for the non-discounted price of £85.00.

Hmmmm!

Mac users have been able to stream video from the BBC’s iPlayer service for a while now – nearly a year I think, but now you can download video as well, and keep it for 30 days before it expires. The BBC has launched a new version of the iPlayer desktop manager, which you can get here.

I’ve downloaded it out of curiosity, but will probably stick to using the iPlayer most on my TV through my Virgin Media box. It does drive me insane though that it takes about two minutes for the box to respond after pressing a button on my remote.

Download to your heart’s content!

Please!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I can’t wait any longer, I totally want one now, I need one now, and my current phone is now a two and half year old piece of junk!!!!!! More on the story here.

Until we see some BBC and Channel 4 programmes on there, I don’t think this will really go mainstream, although some big shows like Ugly Betty and Grey’s Anatomy are on there now. The question is will that ever happen? Broadcasters here are already working on their own commercial venture for programming which is more than seven days past its transmission date.

However, I’m not going to believe it until I hear it from either Apple or O2, as previous rumours had suggested it was Vodafone and T-mobile that were going to be carrying the ‘phone in Europe.

Hopefully the fact that The Times are saying it’s O2 means it’s a bit closer to the truth!

If you don’t know what the fuss is about, check out this cool unofficial ad (via One Digital Life) or the iPhone site itself.

I think this might be the most exciting post I ever write! I have been busy this week getting to grips with new household appliances. I got a new washing machine / tumble dryer delivered on Wednesday after successfully managing to disconnect the old one without entirely flooding my flat. It seems extremely complicated (as all washing machines seem to be) so I am trying to figure it out. It’s nice having a tumble dryer, but I’m not looking forward to the higher electricity bills. And also that can’t be great for the environment. I am looking forward to having washing which smells of Bounce though as my Mum uses that in Dallas when I’m there, and I like it!

I also got this beast of a printer which is absolutely fantastic. Basically my old printer had a serial connection which meant I couldn’t use it with my Mac. Now however, I can print to it wirelessly (using my Airport Express) AND it’s a scanner as well, AND it prints directly onto CDs and DVDs which is totally class (obviously I’m just copying DVDs for my own use). Anyway, it’s a Canon PIXMA MP600, and if you’re looking for a new printer, I’d highly recommend it. I found the best deal was here.

I’ve also spent this week getting to grips with Final Cut Express, as I edit together a home video as a favour for my Dad, who filmed lots on a trip to Australia a while ago. I hadn’t used FCE before, but it seems pretty full-featured to me, and I’m used to using AVID software at work. Livetype, which comes with FCE is brilliant for titling, and I haven’t even looked at Soundtrack yet.

Other than that, I have been pretty quiet. I’ve started on a new series at work, which is quite good because it’s a series I came up with myself that I was lucky to get commissioned. It’s a big interactive type thing, but it won’t be on air until the end of this year at the latest. The nice thing about producing is that you get to make the series look and feel how you want (within the budget obviously) but it will be a bit lonely as the rest of the team that I’ll eventually have won’t be coming on board until July. I’ll tell you more about it when I can!

In an aside, can I say I was really pi**ed off that Tara won Comic Relief does Fame Academy. Sean deserved to win! Also, I know I should have split this into seperate posts, but I simply couldn’t be bothered.

My sister Ailse got a new laptop this week – her first Mac, a Macbook. I’ve had a Mac for a while now, so I helped her set it up with some stuff that I think is pretty useful, but which you might not know about if you’ve just got your first Mac. Here’s what I helped her out with….

• transferring her music off her iPod onto her new computer – check out Senuti – it’s free, but make sure you follow all the instructions!
• how to copy DVDs onto your iPod – use the free software Handbrake, and the excellent guide to how to use it here
• a free virus scanner – Clamxav. Ok, so viruses may not affect Macs, but you want to avoid passing viruses received by e-mail onto your Windows friends
• Flip4Mac – the Mac version of Windows Media Player is no longer updated or supported by Microsoft, so if you want to watch Windows Media Player files on your Mac, best grab this download, which has been made available for free from the Microsoft site

One thing Ailse didn’t want to use at the moment, but which I quite like is Audioscrobbler (scroll down the page). Sign up for free to Last.fm, download Audioscrobbler, and everytime you play music, it’ll upload that tune to Last.fm. From there you can find people that like the same kind of music, and therefore discover (and listen to) new bands that you might like.

If you’ve just got a new mac, and it’s your first Mac, check out Apple’s Mac 101 guides. And if you’ve got a Mac and think I’ve missed something, leave a comment!